Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale | Hacker News Reader

Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale

sethares.engr.wisc.edu

39 pointsTomte4 comments

This is an interesting premise.

The timbre of instruments largely due to the harmonics that they exhibit, and for natural instruments these tend to be simple whole number ratios that we replicate in our scales in just temperament, and approximate more flexibly in equal temperament.

I had never considered what scales a synthetic sound with unfamiliar harmonics would sound best in.

Edit: Not even synthetic instruments, but Gamelan instruments too! Oh so cool, I've seen many Gamelan performances and its very exciting as a musician to hear such a rich and different paradigm.

Bells and metal tubes all can have funky harmonics too (and sub harmonics which is interesting). I don't know if it qualifies as "timbre" but if you remove the initial attack, many instruments sound very similar. There are some tests on youtube that I did a lot worse than I thought I would.

One of my go-to for making a new instrument sound is to tamper with the ADSR envelopes, the attack (as you say, the first part, like a pluck of a string or mallet hitting a bell), decay, how long the note "fades" naturally, sustain which is the total length of a note, and release, which is how long a note plays after you "release" it.

Turning the attack up removes the pluck, setting the other three short makes anything percussive, and you can get weirdness if you mess with decay and release with echo / delay effects.

I should sleep, this was way harder to explain than it should have been.

Example, harp has a sharp attack, and real long decay, sustain, and release. To make that a pizzicato violin, you snap the decay and sustain to nothing, and leave a little release. Now your harp sounds like a violin.

Fantastic find, thank you. Many explorations of nonstandard tunings simply focus on how pure are the various intervals one can form in the tuning. But timbre really does play a crucial and often neglected role. It's been known for a long time for example that carillons, whose overtones more closely approximate a minor chord, sound more consonant when harmonized according to this knowledge.

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